by Maureen Kincaid Speller

 

Maureen Kincaid Speller of the British Science Fiction Association examines her views on John Wyndham. This article was originally published in the fanzine Banana Wings 11 (1988) edited by Claire Brialy and Mark Plummer

We're listening to a radio adaptation of The Kraken Wakes, the first Wyndham novel I ever read, probably the first science fiction novel I ever consciously read, and it sounds more like an early episode of Terry and June. Every second word is "darling", spoken in that characteristic early sixties sit-com manner I have always loathed (I recall as a child being baffled by the fact that married couples on TV shows seemed to call each other 'darling' all the time, whereas my parents didn't, and feeling that something, somewhere wasn't quite right, if I could only work out what). More than that, I am becoming intensely irritated with the Phyllis Watson character who is quite clearly a competent woman in her own right, the better writer of the two and so on, and yet every time they need information she automatically goes into 'adoring woman' mode to twist the men round her little finger (and every time, they fall for it). I mean, I know the hook is forty-three years old, and they did things differently back then but... arrgh!

Ensconced once more in a pile of cushions. I get back to the problem in hand, which is basically that, so far as I can tell, half of this production is incredibly faithful to my memory of the novel, whereas half of it seems to have sprung fully-armed from the imagination of the adaptor and is amazingly tedious. And that can't be right, surely? I mean, I remember the hook so well. I remember the red lights in the sky, the mysterious objects plunging into the water and vanishing into the deepest parts of the ocean. I remember the sea-tanks; indeed, I still remember the attack on the square at Escondido with startling clarity. So I lie on the floor, murmuring plot elements to myself and checking them off as they appear, even down to the girl being dragged away by her hair. I remember the icebergs in the Channel, and the brick arbour outside the Cornish cottage that hides a stock of food. I don't, however, remember London being flooded, or the voyage to Cornwall by motorboat -- although strangely I remember the bit at the end, where they are contemplating a new world order as they sit on the hillside. I think it was the fact that there were just the two of them, and the world seemed empty and peaceful

So, here I am, weeks later, having done the obvious thing and gone away to reread John Wyndham, no light matter considering that the. books were buried way at the back of the book room, behind three duplicators, a collating table and eight trays of sf magazines, requiring a major removal job to reach them (I'd just like you to appreciate my level of dedication to the literary cause, not to mention the broken fingernails and the paper-cut sustained along the way). And they'd been breeding! Quite apart from the well-known novels - The Day of the Tiffins, The Kraken Wakes, The Midwich Cuckoos and The Chrysalids -- not to mention the ones we always half-overlook --Trouble With Lichen and Chocky --I found a whole bunch of stuff I'd bought fifteen years back, presumably read and then entirely forgotten about: The Secret People and Stowaways to Mars, and collections of short stories, most of which totally failed to stick in my mind. I was quite impressed with my comprehensive collection of Wyndham's stuff, under his many and varied semi-pseudonyms, until I hauled out Old Faithful, the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia, and found that as usual I didn't know the half of it. I'm at least one novel and several collections of stories short of a completish set, and Wyndham was one of those luckless authors whose books seemed to be published abroad under different and often rather inferior titles, which muddies the bibliographical waters even further (indeed, there is one web page I came across where the compiler is clearly blissfully unaware that Re-birth and Out of the Deeps are in fact The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes, titles which are so much more evocative), so I'm not tremendously confident even now that I know what I'm missing.

And the more I read on, the more I realise I don't know. I guess I'd always assumed that Wyndham popped up in the Fifties as a fully-fledged writer of cosy catastrophe, without really thinking about how he'd got there. I didn't know, for instance, that John Beynon Harris had won a prize for devising a banner slogan for Hugo Gernsback's Air Wonder Stories (Future Flying Fiction, if you must know), although it hadn't saved the magazine from foundering (and Gernsback hadn't paid him in gold as originally promised), nor that Wyndham had himself written for the pulps. In fact, I only found all that out last week, while I was reading Leslie Flood's introduction to The Best of John Wyndham 1951-60. More to the point, I quickly realised I'd bitten off altogether more than I could chew, and so for the purposes of this stroll down memory lane, the pre-war Wyndham has had to be put to one side until I can explore it further... so there's another pile of books teetering temptingly on the 'To Be Read' shelf.

When I started rereading Wyndham, I decided to do it in chronological order, for no other reason than that I've got a very tidy mind and naively cling to the notion that authors publish their books in the order they write them (a notion which I just know is going to come unstuck when I start to read the early works of Iain Banks and his skiffy alter-ego), which meant that I started with Day of the Triffids (1951). The thing about Day of the Triffids is that everyone knows the story... or thinks they do. Meteors, blindness and marauding plants, right? Absolutely, and no, not at all, all at the same time. Yes, it's about mysterious meteor showers in the sky, the blinding of most of the world's population as a result, and their consequent struggle to deal with the deadly triffids. My first encounter with Day of the Triffids came as a result of seeing that god-awful 1963 film when I was young, and it wasn't until the TV adaptation in 1981 (starring the very wonderful John Duttine) that I realised the triffids had been there all along. Unfortunately, even then I didn't pick up where the triffids had come from, not until I reread the book, and I also failed to grasp the point that the meteor showers weren't necessarily that... although you could believe it if you wanted to, and indeed still can; as the narrator, Bill Masen, points out, he's only speculating that the ring of satellite weapons orbiting the world may have gone horribly wrong and destroyed the eyesight of the people they were supposed to protect.

The 1963 film shows a neatly sanitary, can-do, problem-solving world in which the triffids are eventually herded together and driven over a cliff into the sea, without much damage to anyone really, whereas the 1981 TV adaptation (which, so far as I can now recall, was pretty faithful to the book) seemed to concentrate more on the horrors of a society which had fallen apart literally overnight and which was now threatened by plague, starvation and the triffids -- who seemed only to have been biding their time, waiting for the appropriate moment to take over. indeed, somewhere along the way, I acquired the impression that the triffids themselves were in some way responsible for the meteor showers. More to the point, I still vividly remember the portrayal of empty streets, of people trying to find food and clinging desperately to whatever they could find, even if it was inedible, of people's terrifying efforts to force a new society into being, or else to maintain the one they were familiar with. I found it intensely disturbing to see this dilemma played out on screen at a time when one of my worst private fears was what might happen to mc if the world did fall apart around my ears, as I still believed it might. I remember mentioning this to a friend at the time and having him reassure mc, what seemed to be the best Wyndhamish fashion that there was no need to worry as, it happened, he and his friends (and a quantity of armaments) would be taking to the hills somewhere in Wales, and of course I could go too -- an invitation I accepted with alacrity, not really thinking about its possible consequences. Nearly twenty years down the line, the charming naivety of this offer and my acceptance of it seems quite laughable to me; these days I'd be more likely to walk out and meet the triffid and get it over and done with rather than try to build a new life in the shattered remains of the old, haunted by too many memories of what had been lost to successfully adapt.

Curiously enough, I discovered when I reread the book that a number of Wyndham's characters apparently felt much the same. I counted at least four pre-meditated suicides in Triffids (two by plunging from windows, one by gassing, one by poisoning), all of which quickly dispelled some accreted notions about Wyndham. It's said, time and again, that he writes cosy catastrophe, hut this seems anything but cosy to me. In which case, what exactly do we mean by "cosy catastrophe'"? You know, I have absolutely no idea. I thought I did, before I put down that sentence; but, having written it, I wandered off to consult Trillion Year Spree and -- short of reading the whole book, cover to cover, before I proceed further -- I can't find a definition more complete than: "The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off." This may stand as a basic rule of thumb, but it doesn't really describe what's going on in Day of the Triffids, at least not to my mind (and incidentally set me off down a track, wondering whether 'cosy' meant 'comfortable' or 'domestic', something else which will have to bear discussion another time).

Back in London, Bill Masen is definitely not having a good time. He has all the qualities of a survivor: thoughtful, practical, with an immense knowledge of the habits of triffids, and conveniently (not to mention almost characteristically) he has no family ties. This is a motif which seems to crop up time and again in Wyndham's writings. His most successful characters seem to be almost entirely unattached to society except in terms of work, or at most they have a strong and practical woman by their side to form a small family unit. Children tend not to figure until some sense of equilibrium has been achieved. One might almost think he's suggesting that it's every man (and his wife) for himself, and certainly in this case, and in The Kraken Wakes, it would seem to be true.

Look at what happens every time Masen becomes involved in someone else's scheme to improve things for the blind survivors. Jack Coker's idealistic plans to have sighted people supervising groups of blind people in the hunt for food falls apart almost immediately, given that it's been carried out by coercion and exists in a state of chaotic organisation and rampant distrust as Coker himself admits later. Miss Durrant's insistence on good Christian values in her little community is very laudable but also clearly impractical, given that it drives away the able bodied and sighted, leaving her struggling to run the place by sheer force of personality and unable to ask for the help she so badly needs when it does turn up. Conversely, Torrence's neo-feudal state, with groups of blind people parcelled out to the sighted in units of ten, to be harnessed to ploughs like horses and fed mashed triffids, as though they were cattle, is hardly more attractive especially when it's made clear that his activity is all geared towards setting up England ready to make war against the groups from other countries who are obviously (obviously) going to come and try to take over... as though they hadn't got anything better to do themselves, Wyndham seems to be asking. In the end, Masen and his new-made family and friends throw in their lot with Michael Beadley's group on the Isle of Wight, looking to make a new and perhaps better world rather than perpetuate the problems of the old.

But does this offer reassurance to the middle classes, worried about the security of their familiar and cosy world? I can't see that it does particularly, but maybe I'm being desperately naive about this as well. My own sense is that he's offering a chance to those with unprejudiced minds, or with the willingness to experiment and to step beyond what has been the norm. Masen, to judge from his description of his childhood and early adulthood, had already stepped well away from his parents' comfortable suburban background, with its emphasis on a well-paid job for life in an easily identifiable desk-bound profession, while Coker is a maverick autodidact. They, in common with Beadley and the others who make their way to the Isle of Wight, recognise the need to adapt to the situation rather than impose a previous model -- be it religious or feudal -- on a situation it wasn't designed to accommodate; and that, I think, is one of the important things about Day of the Triffids, making it much more than a merry romp dodging walking trees. It is a frightening hook in many respects, and this is something I think too many people too easily overlook. Wyndham, like Richard Jefferies in After London (which I am sure he must have read), has the skill to evoke the terrible sense of desolation when a familiar place is suddenly deserted by its occupants and left to be swallowed up by rampant nature. This is a theme which was evoked fairly successfully and proved equally as potent in Ronald Wright's much more recent A Scientific Romance... I remember reading the various rave reviews and thinking, "Yes? So?" and wondering whether the reviewers would take themselves off to read some science fiction and stop behaving as though Wright had invented something new and miraculous, rather than rediscovered the wheel... although the book is actually a very pleasant read, for all that, and would have been even better if he'd kept up with the plot.

On the other hand, it's also far too easy to overlook the political and philosophical content of Wyndham's writing, and it's only now that I'm coming to realise that I have to plead guilty to this one in particular. I realised this when I reread The Kraken Wakes for the first time in god knows how many years, trying to work out why I'd been so disappointed with that radio adaptation. The answer was astonishingly simple; initially reading it at a formative age, I'd extracted all the features that appealed, and simply thrown away the rest. At twelve, I had no interest in global politics, scarcely any knowledge of politics at all beyond the idea that there was this thing called a General Election every five years that everyone made a fuss about and my mother said wasn't important, ditto an annual event called The Budget, which seemed to bring gloom and despondency for no discernable reason. Ergo, I had no interest in Wyndham's portrayal of a world uncertain about how to cope with a threat it couldn't readily categorise, and unable to accept that it was an external threat at that. Nope, I fastened on to the really interesting stuff, the UFOs and the aliens, and for years was quite content to believe this was all there was to the book. I suppose it was understandable. We'd just finished staggering through the great years of the Warminster UFO flap, when everyone was sighting UFOS all over the place; when even that seminal children's programme, Blue Peter, was talking about them (not to mention still running stories about Bleep the friendly alien and his astronaut pal, Booster - required watching for me, and I'd love to see them again... I still remember the sound of the spacey, spooky music) and my favourite reading from the library was a book about UFOs, including all the old favourites like Kenneth Arnold's sighting over Mount Rainier, and Captain Thomas Mantell flying his plane to some impossible height because he'd mistaken Venus for an alien craft, not to mention chapters on the Bermuda Triangle and other great mysteries.

But having, if not put away childish things, then come to realise that there's more than one way to read a book, I can see now that my impression of The Kraken Wakes is so very far from the truth as to make me wonder whether I wasn't reading another hook with the same title but entirely different plot. In all fairness, though, I must point out that Wyndham deals with a surprising number of characteristically 'Fortean' subjects, including mutant carnivorous plants, UFOs and sea-monsters, telepathy and wonder drugs, not to mention 'missing time' and alien impregnation, so maybe I wasn't quite so far off the mark... pity about the crop circles, though. Yet, plotwise, The Kraken Wakes is a touch slow. Oh, all right, it's glacial. It does have a plot, despite what at least one commentator seems to think, but I have to confess that it is buried deep under the jungle of discussion about the ways in which different world powers respond to the threat of the "sea-tanks" -- including the deeply unimpressive European response, which is to ignore it altogether so long as it's not attacking our people. This is pretty standard stuff, I suppose, but there is a note of asperity which suggests that Wyndham's wartime experiences included some skirmishes with obdurate bureaucracy. Indeed, Wyndham's novel is more a semi-fictionalised speculation as to what might happen if the world faced global crisis, and heaven knows it's all here. The sea-tanks, truffling away in the Deeps, completely alter the world's climatic conditions, causing the polar icecaps to disintegrate, raising the sea-levels catastrophically; once again, it's Everyman-and-his-wife for himself after the government is shown once again to be entirely incompetent, even with due warning of what is likely to happen, and society crumbles before our very eyes, much as the pathetic sea-wall defence does along the Embankment.

Again, there's nothing cosy here. I found it interesting, for instance, that both the narrator and his wife had nervous breakdowns as a result of their horrific encounters with the sea-tanks, and indeed that his was as much as anything responsible for hers - a curious sharing of the burden I'd not thought to find in a novel written in 1953. Nor, for that matter, had I expected to find this kind of emotional anguish in a literature where, as I understood it, a stiff upper up and boundless optimism were what counted. Oh, optimism there is, right at the end, but more based on the fact that they've survived, that people have survived global flooding before and will again, rather than on any immediate certainty of their own continued existence. The only novel I can think of where the optimism is immediately fulfilled is in The Chrysalids when the telepathic teenagers are rescued and taken away to the more liberal, not to mention much more technically advanced, society of Sealand, the society of Labrador and Newf standing as an awful warning of what will happen to those not prepared to embrace new ideas.

The Kraken Wakes is also, I think, more characteristic of Wyndham in other ways. This is generally not an action-packed kind of science fiction. Far from it; Wyndham is a very cerebral writer. His characters sit down and discuss things. They tell rather than show, for the most part, though when he does "show", as with the sea-tank attack on Escondido, the images are vivid and powerful and remain firmly stuck in the memory for ever after. He is, though, undoubtedly concerned with exploring the full implications of the threats he places his world under; and it can require a lot of concentration, not to mention context, to fully understand what's going on. Which is not to say that his work is boring; this is by no means true, but reading him can feel like detective work, or unpicking embroidery stitches to see how they were put together. Mind you, that's the kind of thing that appeals to me, so feel free to entirely disregard my enthusiasm.

The Kraken Wakes in particular prompted another question, about Wyndham's attitude to women. I'd noticed in the radio adaptation that there seemed to be a certain ambiguity regarding this. One moment Phyllis is doing the "oh my god, oh my god, it's a monster" routine; the next, she calmly locks the door and throws the key away to prevent Michael going down to his certain death in the square, having perceived the risks more quickly than he apparently was capable of. Similarly, she's the one who thinks ahead and conceals food at the Cornish cottage, but she's the one who suddenly can't bear their awful life in a flooded London. She's the better writer, by all accounts, but Michael gets her onto at least one kraken-hunting expedition by suggesting she'd enjoy the tropical sunshine. and she worries about whether they're allowed to claim for new clothes for the trip, thus fulfilling, her role as the brainless "little woman".

The constant shifting in attitude is puzzling, and leaves me uncertain as to what it is thai Wyndham actually thought about women, or rather, how much he pandered to the mores of the times; I cannot help but notice that his novels do tend to feature surprisingly strong and competent women. Josella, for example, confidently finds her solitary way to that farmhouse at Pulborough she'd told Bill about, and indeed gets there before him. Similarly, in The Chrysalids, it is Rosalind who masterminds the escape for herself, David and Petra, and "the Sealand woman" who rescues them at the very end. One can only think that Wyndham takes it very much for granted that women are entirely capable of dealing with the world around them, but every now and then decides that he's actually got to do something about explaining this to people who haven't caught on yet; this tends in turn to lead to some of the more awful passages of his work, the ones; which tend to cause a sharp intake of breath and a quick check to see exactly which character is explaining that women really would prefer to settle down and get married, because that's their proper role (usually older characters and distressingly but appropriately, often the female ones). One fears that his efforts at propaganda are doomed, especially when they turn into Trouble With Lichen, a noble but doomed effort at satire, with a novel plot in which a female biochemist, having isolated an anti-ageing component in a batch of lichen, goes on to use it in beauty preparations on the wives of the alleged great, good and influential, in an effort to win greater equality for women by suborning these men. The whole thing falls apart horribly, needless to say as does the satire. Many of Wyndham's short stories were written in a light comic vein and this; comes out pretty much the same at a far more tedious length, of very little help to us swooning, screaming female skiffy types. On the other hand. I must admit I relish this one for its fascinating assembly of stereotypes, a kind of cultural zoo, whether or not it's science fiction.

The great pity is that Wyndham could handle the perceived female predicament with considerably greater sensitivity when he put his mind to it, as he demonstrated in The Midwich Cuckoos. Again, this is a book we all think we know, I'm sure, and yet for many the perception is based on the film, Village of the Damned. l used to think that was a very unfortunate name for the film, until I read the book; now I'm more inclined to think that yes, the village was damned in some curious way. On the other band, the film did the book no favour whatsoever by producing those spooky pale, bug-eyed children when in the book they're described as golden-eyed, and one has the sense that they are rather more beautiful, if even more threatening, because of that. And what I hadn't expected, when I came to read the book, was a very thoughtful consideration of what it must be like to suddenly discover that you are pregnant, when you know with absolute certainty that you can't possibly be, and what effect that has on you and your society. Given that the pregnant women in the village range from a schoolgirl to women who might reasonably be expected to be past childbearing age, from the village career virgin to one half of a lesbian partnership, to women whose husbands have been away in the forces for some time, to a woman whose mental condition is already fragile after a previously unmentioned abortion, it's a remarkable piece of imaginative el'fort on Wyndham's part, and I salute him for it.

As a theme it gradually loses impetus as the children are born, grow and withdraw from the village, but there are still odd sparks of thinking that would, I anticipate, have been unexpected then, such as that women could so easily reject these children as being none of theirs. Indeed, those who retain any love or warmth towards the cuckoos are very much in the minority, and almost obtuse in their persistent belief that the children aren't going to cause any trouble if they are left to themselves, that murder and aircraft crashes are the peccadilloes of youth on a par with scrumping for apples. They may be right, of course, but the book has by this time shifted to the notion that, children or not, these creatures are simply too dangerous to have around, and thus Britain follows the example of the other nations inadvertently hosting such children and nukes them. Or rather, Britain doesn't actually do anything at all; it's once again left to the lone hero, Zellaby, to grasp what is really likely to happen, and to go off to the Grange armed with large amounts of high explosive. We are once more back in familiar Wyndham territory, with the individual having to take responsibility for his own future, rather than waiting for the government to do anything about it for him Which in itself is a problematic attitude; one has only to think about American survivalist groups; and the so-called mountain men to realise that this can get way out of control. One wonders what Wyndham would have made of the premillennial upheavals we're now witnessing.

All this and I haven't mentioned Wyndham's short stories. I have to say that for the most part I find them a little disappointing... well, not really disappointing but those I've read tend to be less skiffy~flavoured than his novel-length works, for all that he introduces the short stories in The Seeds of Time as a series of experiments using sf motifs in a variety of different short story styles. I find it interesting that he sees the short story in these terms, as a kind of lab bench on which he can experiment; the results are variable, to say the least, and serve as a reminder that short story writing has a long and intricate history, and that it was rather less specialised an area than it is now. There are one or two of the stories I have read which strike me as good solid science fiction., such as the deeply shocking "Survival", while others are light and comic, with a Wellsian flavour, such as the very entertaining "Pawley's Peepholes", which looks at the downside of time-travel tourism. And "Dumb Martian" seems to express, once again, Wyndham's feeling that women are every bit as capable as men, a story for any time.

Which seems to bring me back to where I began. My efforts to solve one small puzzle concerning John Wyndham have instead revealed that there is far more to the man than a handful of catastrophe novels, and the voyage of discovery is only just beginning.

from: "http://www.liv.ac.uk/~asawyer/mks.html